The Lure (2015)

We’re now on the third and final sample of Creature Canon Contenders found on The Criterion Channel, and since we were on the topic of deconstructionist monster stories: The Lure, a Polish horror/musical/fantasy recreation of the eighties directed and co-written by Agnieszka Smoczynska, is a highly deconstructionist take on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Do you consider mermaids to be “monsters”? Well, this movie certainly does—in this, mermaids have a tendency to rip throats out and eat human hearts, which is slightly different from the norm, but not that far removed from their mythical origins. BUT, aside from being dangerous, flesh-eating demi-humans with beautiful voices (whose existence in the hyper-stylized world of the film seems to be not necessarily common knowledge, but no one seems to have their mind blown by it), they are also a metaphorical representation of how women are exploited, and how they try to change themselves to better fit societal expectations. Moving between flashy choreographed musical numbers and a grungy depiction of urban Europe in the eighties, you can really see both sides of the central argument: is this really a world worth giving up heart eating and underwater merriment for?

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.

Monster Multimedia: When I Arrived At The Castle (2019)

Welcome to October. I usually use this series to examine older things, but as a change of pace, here’s something from this year that fits…

When I began writing these posts, I made the decision to leave out certain kinds of monster stories from the material I’d be analyzing, and it was mostly the most well-known ones: vampires, werewolves, the undead. I wanted to focus mostly on the nebulous “miscellaneous” category, because that is usually what falls into my wheelhouse, and I thought that was where I’d find ground that was not nearly as well-trodden. There’s only so much you can write about the potent symbolism of vampires and werewolves that hasn’t been written thousands of times before—that comes with the territory when you’re that ubiquitous in the culture. Even so, sometimes I make exceptions.

Emily Carroll’s comic When I Arrived At The Castle has a vampire in it, but also a cat-person, although for a few reasons I’d say that the cat-person is sort of analogous to a werewolf (at least it provides the same animalisic contrast that a werewolf would.) While utilizing some of the most well-worn horror tropes on the surface—beginning with a dark castle on a stormy night—the book has a distinct take on them, one that combines fairy tale storytelling, body horror, and interpersonal violence to tell a story about guilt, abuse, and the terrors that lurk deep within ourselves. Both the characters here are split between their surface humanity, rendered in monochrome, and red-drenched monstrosity that’s simmering beneath—this is all about the dual nature that lies at the heart of these things, rendered in all its gruesomeness.